Kevin Smith says that after the experience of trying to market Zack and Miri Make a Porno, the studio was worried about running TV ads for A Couple of Dicks. They checked with the networks, who said that as long as the word "dicks" was in the title (the plural, specifically; "dick" apparently would have been OK) they wouldn't air ads until after 9:00 PM. So they had to come up with a new name.

Cop Out makes it sound like an 80's cop buddy movie, which Smith says is the feel he was going for anyway, plus it's a little meta-commentary on the forced title change. Smith still sounds disappointed: "We were making up sequel titles in our heads, dude. Like, you know, Two Bigger Dicks. Or Dicks 2: It Just Got Harder."

The trailer is OK, but not gaspingly hilarious. I liked Kevin Smith's last couple of movies, but this is the first movie he directed that he didn't also write, so it's hard to know what to expect. It might not have any funnier moments than Tracy shoving nachos into his face (see above).

The last good, successful movie that starred John Cusack that I can think of is High Fidelity from 2000 (actually, that's the last movie he was in that I saw in the theater, so that's probably why I think that.) I used to think of him as one of my favorite actors, not that he had the most incredible range, but that there was a better than average chance that a movie he was in would be worth seeing. Somewhere around Must Love Dogs, everything changed.

Anyway, Hot Tub Time Machine could be an OK example of a doofusy time-travel 80's spoof. It's directed by Cusack's old pal Steve Pink, and it has Crispin Glover in it, so there is hope.

You may not have heard of this movie, which was released late this summer, and you almost definitely didn't see it: it only made about $200,000 in box office. Here are three interesting things about this movie:

1) It stars Robin Williams
2) It was written and directed by Bobcat Goldthwait
3) It's maybe the darkest, most cynical comedy I've ever seen.

These things are probably the reasons why so few people saw it: how do you market a really, really dark Robin Williams comedy? No Mrs. Doubtfire fan should see this movie (you can see some of their horrified comments on IMDb) and few fans of disturbing, sick comedy would be all that intrigued by a Robin Williams vehicle.

I'm not going to give away anything about the plot, which is weird enough that it should be experienced with no advance knowledge. The movie centers on some really detestable, self-centered characters, some overtly so and some who think they're good and decent people but are actually as bad as everyone else, sort of like Arrested Development's Michael Bluth. The main themes include suicide, masturbation, literary fraud, and poop porn. And it has a sort of sweet ending.

It's not for everyone, and it's probably not altogether bad that the movie didn't reach many people in theaters, because it just would have made the people who should have been watching Old Dogs feel kind of dirty. But for fans of Heathers who wish the main characters had been floundering, desperate adults instead of sneering teens, it's worth a look. Robin Williams is great, and his outrageously obnoxious son is played by Juni from Spy Kids (Daryl Sabara) which is a sort of shocking new direction for him. There were some funnier movies that came out this year, but none that were anything like this.

(There are a few good reviews of the movie that are worth reading after you've seen it, but they give away everything about the plot that's best left as a surprise. Here's the Times review and the Cinematical review; both are huge spoilers. Roger Ebert liked it too, but the movie wasn't quite dark enough for him.)

December 17, 2009

Runaways!

I didn't realize how excited I was for The Runaways biopic until I watched this excellent short trailer that came out today and my mind exploded.

Yeah! They're gonna tear this world apart!

In addition to the cast that plays the band (Kristen Stewart, finally playing the big butch role I've always wanted her to do, little Dakota Fanning in full glam-punk regalia, and Alia Shawkut as a bassist that never actually existed, but was definitely worth inventing so that Alia Shawkut could be in this movie) there's Michael Shannon as the band's manager Kim Fowley.

Fowley was a legendary producer in his own right, producing "Alley Oop", Dr. Demento standby "They're Coming To Take Me Away, Ha-Ha", and some early Jonathan Richman albums, and co-writing songs for KISS and Slade among others. As is sometimes the case with legendary producers, particularly those who discover and promote successful girl groups, he was also a real jerk, and after The Runaways split up, he used the name to start a new group called The Runaways, then was sued by the original band for the name and money he owed them.

Anyway, Michael Shannon is the actor to play Kim Fowley. Dark, charismatic, sort of sinister, and not afraid to play deeply slimy guys.

I can't wait to see the transformation of the band from the group of girls who posed in a wood-paneled basement in their t-shirts above (look at that cool teenage Lita Ford on the right!) to the stylized, heavily-jumpsuited rock act they became:

December 14, 2009

Where the hell has Julianne Moore been?

Over the weekend I watched last week's episode of 30 Rock, and there was guest star Julianne Moore, playing the cutest girl in East Sandchester High School's Class of '76, Nancy Donovan. She was so funny and gorgeous, and even if her Boston accent was a little uneven (her "I wanna sit on it and play a boh-uhd game!" was totally weird and great) I was delighted to see her again.

Because, really, when was the last time you saw Julianne Moore in anything? Here's her IMDb page. For me, it was when she played the Joan Baez-esque person in I'm Not There, and that was two years ago. Before that, she had a couple of scenes in Children of Men in 2006.

Since then, things haven't looked so hot for Julianne. She's gotten into some pretty terrible desperate mom movies with The Forgotten (spoiler!: aliens took her kid) and Freedomland (spoiler!: she accidentally killed her kid) and other questionable stuff like The Prizewinner of Defiance, Ohio and Nicolas Cage's schlocky psychic Next. Then there was Blindness, which I don't think anyone saw, and now she's in Tom Ford's adaptation of Christopher Isherwood's A Single Man, which looks OK, I guess.

It's high time for Julianne Moore to have a starring role in a big, great movie. Paul Thomas Anderson could use her again, but he doesn't seem to be working on anything. She's got something coming up with Lisa Cholodenko (who did Laurel Canyon) called The Kids Are All Right that could be OK, and some Barry Levinson adaptation of a Larry McMurtry novel about a gutsy pioneer woman called Boone's Lick, which despite the title is probably not a porny comedy.

At least one of these had better be at least as good as her re-enactment of "Hey, Beantown!" with Alec Baldwin.

What it was like to make The Hurt Locker

Now that it's awards season, The Hurt Locker is going to be all over the press again for the next couple of months. It's already won the Boston and LA Critics awards (best film and best director) and will probably be all over the Golden Globes nominations that come out tomorrow.

Reuters has a great piece on the origins and production of the movie--starting with screenwriter Mark Boal, who was an embedded journalist with an Iraq bomb squad in 2004, through getting funding, deciding to film in Jordan (it was a lot cheaper than Morocco) and finding a crew willing to work there, and writing scenes on the fly during the shoot, based on what was going on in their locations.

But the best details are about the incredibly difficult conditions they worked in. The star, Jeremy Renner, was wearing that crazy armored spacesuit in July in Jordan, and they couldn't use the suit's built-in air conditioner because it made too much noise.

One action sequence was "the week from hell," Anthony Mackie said. "Jeremy and I were just laying out there baking in the sun for hours and hours. Thirty pounds of gear, laying on your stomachs, 115-degree heat bouncing up off the sand and into your face. We were covered in flies. As uncomfortable as it looked on film is how uncomfortable it was in real life."

"I think we all had a nervous breakdown or two or three," Renner said.

Hey, at least it was a 44-day film shoot, and not an 15-month tour.

The article also points out that the cinematographer was Barry Ackroyd, who also shot United 93. Neither movie is a documentary, but both had a really appealing and appropriate documentary-like feel that was largely created through how they were filmed. Ackroyd gets a little too jerky with the handheld camera now and then, but overall I like his style a lot. He's also the cinematographer for Green Zone, a fictional Iraq movie with Matt Damon coming out next year. (It's directed by Paul Greengrass, who also did United 93 and the last two Bourne movies, which used way too much of the jerky handheld, in my opinion.)

So after all that, the movie only brought in about $12 million domestically. And I thought it was one of the indie hits of the year. By comparison, Precious has made $36 million so far. Hurt Locker will probably get re-released early next year if it gets a Best Picture nomination, so it should eventually make a lot more.

December 7, 2009

Holiday gifts for kids

Like a lot of people out there, I have a growing number of small children in my life, and all those children need presents. When you don't spend a whole lot of time around kids, it can be hard to keep up with their interests and obsessions. For example, I only recently found out about Bakugan and its vast universe of Battle Brawler merchandise that any self-respecting 6 year-old is required to possess. You could randomly select a few toys from this product line, but how do you know if you're choosing the coolest action figure, video game, or, God help you, activity book?

If you're playing the role of the cool but untrustworthy aunt/uncle/family friend, you could just give all the kids on your list a carton of Kool cigarettes and a handle of whiskey. Or if you really want to ensure that you'll never be invited to a Christmas celebration again, give them a new book for families that I received an email about today, just in time for the holidays. It's called Why He Hates You!, and it's a book that invites mothers and sons to explore all the ways they hate each other.

The targeted audience of the book is black women who raised their children alone and black boys raised by single moms, but why not share the hate? Author Janks Morton uses his own experiences as the basis for uncovering "angst-creating parental techniques such as negotiation, manipulation, and castigation"--techniques that, let's be honest, span all races and backgrounds, and lead to deep-rooted parent-hating. Actually, mother-hating.

December 3, 2009

David Cross, Will Arnett, and Spike Jonze do a TV show together

Unfortunately, it's on Channel 4. In the UK. I guess this is payback for Ricky Gervais coming to Hollywood and The Daily Show's poaching of John Oliver. Or some kind of karmic retribution for American TV canceling Arrested Development.

Anyway, here's a clip that features a ton of really spectacular swearing by Will Arnett, who hires the nebbishy David Cross away from his straight-man boss Spike Jonze (first thing Jonze has been in since Three Kings!) to go to London to market an energy drink called Thunder Muscle:

Because the whole world sucks, you can't watch the full episodes that are up on the Channel 4 website if you're in the US. But it'll be over here eventually. Hey, it only took three years for IFC to start airing episodes of Arrested Development.